New game features #1: The Skills to pay the Bills
9th May, 2008

One of the most intriguing new additions to the football management experience introduced by Football Manager Live is the skills system.

In the traditional offline FM games, users would take over at the helm of an existing team, and be able to bring in staff to perform certain jobs like scouting and coaching. In Football Manager Live, you create your own club, and you are ALL the staff.

To reflect the fact that you’re starting from scratch with no reputation or history, it makes sense that to begin with you don’t know every player in the world and how good they are- this is unlockable knowledge that you have to earn.

Likewise, a novice manager wouldn’t be able to give his team complicated tactical instructions and expect them to be effective. Just like in real life, this is a skill that takes time to master. From telling your wingers exactly how often they should take long shots at goal to your effectiveness at negotiating contracts with players, the skills system in Football Manager Live will help you become as effective a manager as you can be.

There are five skill categories: coaching, scouting, physiotherapy, management, and tactics. Within each category, there are specific skills relating to that area; like treating knee injuries within physiotherapy, or contract negotiation within the management category.

Learning coaching skills will get the most out of players on the training pitch, and you’ll notice improvements in your existing squad’s attributes and performance, whilst focusing on scouting will make more players visible to you when scouring the world for fresh talent. This extends further, as sub-skills in each category mean you can specialise in very specific areas. So whilst you can get yourself started with general global scouting, if you want to invest your time specifically in unearthing the latest wonderkid from South America, you can.

Think there may be some hidden gems in East Africa? You can focus your resources there too, if you choose. Scouting doesn’t just extend to seeing players, but in recognising their talent. The ‘judging potential’ skill within scouting unlocks the ability to see how good a youngster is likely to be once they’ve matured, illustrated by a number of stars that appear on their profile. A one star player is unlikely to improve, while a five star youth is destined to be a superstar.

To learn a skill, you simply select the one you want to learn and drag it with your mouse into a training box. Typically, a skill has five levels to learn. Each level takes a certain time to accomplish, so whilst ‘finishing level 1’ will have your players finishing improving within a matter of minutes, an advanced target like ‘Finance level 5’ will take you more than a month to master.

With a manager only able to train in one skill at any one time, deciding when and what to learn is fundamental to getting the most out of your club. Your skill training goes on 24/7, so once you’ve decided what to train in you can get on with playing matches, chatting to other managers, or even log off- you’ll still be learning your desired skill.

Learning all the skills that will be in place for the launch of Football Manager Live will take managers up to a whopping six years of play, and there are plans to add lots more skills to the game due to the dev teams model of constant development, which will allow new features to be added to the game over time. The system will help managers specialise in the areas that they want to be experts in, and is expected that friends inside the gameworlds will help each other out utilising their skills to do this.

If you’re scratching your head and thinking this is all a bit much, Sports Interactive have made the system really simple to use. There’s a step-by-step wizard that takes you through setting up your club when you first log in for the first time.

This’ll have you designing your home and away strips in minutes, as well as naming your stadium and deciding how big you’d like your pitch. If you want to spruce up your turf with a few snazzy patterns, this just takes a couple of clicks of the mouse too. At this point, you make your first real decision as a manager: selecting your starting skills.

These give you a head start as a manger by giving you a range of starter skills that you can acquire instantly to get you going. This will begin to shape what kind of a manager you will be, and where your strengths will lie.

Your options are:

Tracksuit Manager: out with the players on the training pitch every day working on their individual skills, you believe that good coaching is essential to the development of your players and the success of your side.

Club Doctor: You know that your players are no good to you on the injured list, so you focus all your time on making sure your players are as fit and healthy as possible with the best in nutrition and fitness training.

Fast learner: You have chosen to study the finer points of the game, and whilst this means that you are not as accomplished as other managers right now, but as a student of the game you’ll learn new skills quicker and catch up in no time.

Strictly Business: You know that whilst some managers spend their time on coaching or scouting, it’s the teams with the strongest financial muscle who tend to come out on top. As a result, when it comes to a deal, there are few managers out there as shrewd as you.

Blackboard Manager:You know that it is how the team performs as a whole that is most important. You have chosen to spend time studying videos of the great teams of the past and honing your tactical knowledge.

Of course, even if you select tracksuit manager, you can still go and train in physiotherapy for the next couple of weeks if you want to. All you’ve done is given yourself a coaching foundation to build your reputation on.

Interestingly, out of the five categories, the tactics skill set came in much later on in development. Initially, beta testers had access to in-depth tactics from the off, meaning a manager who had just signed up could access instructions like man marking and position swapping straight away, which obviously you wouldn’t be able to get out of a squad of players without days of preparation.

Remember, this game plays out live and in real time, and the world is always alive even when you’re away from your machine. So to tailor your own system to perfectly suit your players, then just like with everything else, you’ll need to focus your time on it.

The move proved popular, as it meant that new managers in the beta test learned to walk before they ran, and managers that wanted to be tactical gurus had to invest in the privilege just like the tracksuit managers and talent spotters.

The time it took to learn certain tactical skills was perhaps slightly out of balance with the time it took to learn skills in other areas with an equivalent advantage, so as is always the case with perfectionists, the system has been tweaked.

On the beta testing forums a few days ago, Sports Interactive’s Marc Duffy explained the changes: “We’ve reorganised the tactics skills, so they should now better represent the needs of the moderate, intermediate and hardcore tacticians out there. The bad news is that this means the existing tactics skills have been wiped, so beta testers will all be back on an even playing field now in the tactics department. The good news is that the time spent on these skills should be repaid in the form of an extended bonus.

To explain, we believe the first system we tried was a little over the top as it really forced everyone to learn at least a few tactics skills. Hopefully this system will be much friendlier to those who don't really care about tactics at all.

Finally, the system is designed to provide a good intermediate level of tactical skill within a couple of days training which again should bring it more into line with the other area.”

So if you’re one of the lucky people out there helping to test Football Manager Live, this clears up why your tactics skills have gone AWOL. Your previously defined tactics have also been removed, as they wouldn’t work under the new system, and the skills system needed to start from scratch. But you’ll have them back quickly, due to the speed boost for the skills for all the previous ones you had learnt.

For those of you itching to play the final game, ask yourself the question: what kind of manager do you want to be?